The creator of a family offices firm in the US, who has also developed software to drive this business, talks about the experience, the lessons and the future direction of this venture.

As recently interviewed by this publication, a firm that provides a digital platform to help professionals manage a family office is iPaladin LLC, based in Florida. Its founder and chief executive is Jill N Creager. Before she founded iPaladin, in 2008 she founded Providence Family Offices in Florida, providing fiduciary administration of private wealth and family trusts. Creager recently described how she developed the software; in this article, the firm goes into detail about exactly how thie changes came about, why, and what lessons it draws from the changes.

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Creager says she knows firsthand the challenges of running a family office. In 2008, she founded Providence Family Offices in Florida, providing fiduciary administration of private wealth and family trusts. As her office grew to serve more families, she found the patchwork of technologies she used to serve those clients didn’t keep up with her workload, her client's needs, or her desire to grow the business.

So, she created her own tool, iPaladin, a secure digital platform on which family members and professionals can work together to manage the family office. Its architecture could be tailored to reflect the governance of any family’s wealth while professionals customize and manage operations, reporting and compliance at every level within it. 
Creager used the first version of iPaladin for six years in her own business. She has set up a new company, iPaladin LLC to launch iPaladin 2.0, the first commercially available version, early this year. 

Complex problems
As family office professionals know, high-net-worth families typically have portfolios containing many entities protecting many different asset classes. (One 2011 report puts the median number of entities, such as LLCs and trusts, at 31; the average for Providence’s families was 40.) These entities typically reside in multiple jurisdictions, with differing laws and tax codes. Documentation related to every one must be kept separately, and most must be managed in a unique way. The associated legal, tax and compliance add up to a constant stream of critical tasks and deadlines for family office professionals. 

Before iPaladin, like other family office managers, Creager had to sort through a sea of routine tasks at any given time to see what needed to be done and ensure it was completed. Errors can lay dormant for decades and result in costly penalties, so she found herself reluctant to offload much responsibility to more junior staff.

With several families’ offices to manage, her office struggled to cope with the stream of tasks and related data. The combination of manual processes, documents, emails and spreadsheets robbed Jill of time she could have better used strategic planning with clients. 

Meantime, the world of family wealth was becoming more complicated. As businesses became global, families were making more cross-border transactions and investments in multiple currencies. Transactions were happening more often, thanks to real-time data and lower transaction costs. The numbers of entity types and asset classes were growing, and at the same time, clients wanted more visibility into their holdings and history of transactions. 

Creager saw that her peers were in the same boat: No-one had a tool for managing the complete family office or addressing its particular needs. 
 

A new tool
Creager started developing iPaladin to solve these challenges for Providence in 2010. She assembled a team of developers to build a single, secure platform where family members and professionals could share information and work together. Since each family’s wealth is structured differently, the team designed the architecture so that it could be fully customized. Moreover, they incorporated into iPaladin the best fiduciary management practices to streamline family office operations, reporting, and compliance.

With iPaladin, Creager was able to grow a healthier family office business. She could take on new clients using high-value professionals to oversee the work while delegating more routine tasks to other staff. She could quote fees with more confidence and defend past ones, using iPaladin to show a client all the work completed in the last period, plus all that was due in the next. Freed from managing minutiae and double-checking manual processes, she could spend more time exploring strategic matters with her clients. She could give them a better view of their overall net worth, and of all activities related to a given entity at any given time. 

As time went on, Creager grew Providence Family Offices to serve six families, and thanks to iPaladin, she did not have to incur the considerable cost of expanding her professional staff by a comparable amount.

Greater efficiency, lower risk
Over time, Creager and her team observed how iPaladin worked in practice and continually made improvements. These were some of the further benefits she realized. Her office became more efficient, thanks to the way iPaladin organized communications, documents, and deadlines. Everything relevant to a particular entity or person, such as a transaction or meeting, stayed associated and accessible via a few clicks. 

Creager was also able to reduce the risks that clients commonly face. First, by automatically saving a record of everything that happened, iPaladin lowered the chance of the business being disrupted by someone leaving. Second, it reduced the risks of error and omission, as tasks were organized, checked off as complete by staff, and quickly reviewed by Creager. And because the system automatically kept a record of how decisions were made over time, it helped foster trust among family members, ward off conflict, and ease tensions between family members and advisors when control was passed from one generation to another.

iPaladin's Next Step
In 2016, Creager decided to make iPaladin version 2.0 available to other family offices. This required the team to upgrade several aspects of the software. They made it easier for the newcomer to use, and completed some detailed functionality. Most important, though, they added state-of-the-art privacy and security controls. Family members or professionals can only access data that they are specifically authorized for; iPaladin is configured to run in the cloud with the latest encryption and scanning tools to prevent a data breach; and it is structured so that families, the ultimate clients, retain control and ownership of their data, no matter how their advisors or employees might rotate.

Creager has battle-tested iPaladin in her own multi-family office. She had seen the positive reactions of her own clients. And now she is ready to launch it in the wider market.